Many applications have been developed or are under development in the areas of environmental monitoring, detecting construction malfunctions of smart houses, and tracking targets. These applications require a good orientation of the nodes relative to a global reference system in order to provide geographical information that is very important. In this paper, we review several localization principles, discuss issues in localization algorithm design and present a numerical simulation with a focus on the evaluation of the error spatial distribution of the mobile terminal positioning in cellular networks. We prove that the position error depends on the placement of network nodes in relation with the terminal location. Also, we demonstrate that the optimal solution of the algorithm is achieved when the reference nodes positions are almost equidistant to the mobile terminal position. Future sensor networks will involve movable sensor nodes, so new localization algorithms will need to be developed to handle these moving nodes and the proposed positioning algorithm is able to solve this issue in a more accurate manner.

Keywords: Localization error, Probability, Energy detection, Cognitive network